Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Almost every day, there are complaints about Metro operators not allowing enough time for riders to get off and on the trains. This sometimes leads to potentially dangerous situations.

I asked a few Metro sources, and apparently, the reason is manual mode.

In manual control, everything runs more slowly. There's more stopping in the tunnels, and when the trains often inch up to the end of the platform, each stop can require more time, sometimes 10, 15, or even more seconds before the doors are even opened. Over an entire run, it adds up to minutes.

Here's the incredible part: After the trains went to manual operation--well over two years ago--the geniuses at Metro management never adjusted the run times, the time it takes the trains to go from one end of a line to the other.

This pinches the operators like this, wrote a Metro source:

I talked to several operators, and all have said that they are allotted the same amount of time to complete their crosstown runs. The differences have been taken out of their break time at each end. Some meal and bathroom breaks have been whittled down to 5 minutes. If you look at the schedules where it tells you how long it takes to get from one end to the other, they have not changed in many, many years.

No wonder the operators are in a hurry, aggressively trying to get the doors shut and the train moving as quickly as possible.

Another source said "the managers who come up with these run times probably haven't even been on Metro for years. They hide in the Jackson Graham building thinking everything is hunky dory."

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